His main bridge to the White House temporarily washed out, his fight with Fundamentalism all but over, and his position on integration no longer requiring daily defense, Billy Graham spent most of the Kennedy years doing what he did best: holding crusades and broadening his base of support. A decade of marathon campaigns had taken such a toll on his physical stamina that he occasionally told reporters he doubted he would live much longer. To give both body and spirit a rest, he began to trim the length of his crusades, moving gradually toward the eight-day (usually Sunday to Sunday) format used in most of his meetings since the mid-1960s. He spent the first four months of 1961 in Florida holding a three-week crusade in Miami and a series of one- and two-day meetings in a dozen other cities. He also spent a fair amount of time on the beach and the golf course, basking in the warm sunshine he had come to love during his days at the Bible institute. He followed the Florida campaign with a less-than-brilliant three-week crusade in Manchester, England, and wound up the season with good outings in Minneapolis and Philadelphia.
In 1962 Graham added another continent to his list by making two month-long forays into South America. Shortly before the first of these, he met with President Kennedy, who was also about to visit South America. In a conversation Graham recounted with obvious pleasure, the President told the preacher, “I’ll be your John the Baptist,” graciously implying that he would prepare the way for one who would follow with a greater message. According to Graham aides, Kennedy felt Graham’s visit to South America would strengthen goodwill between the United States and its neighbors unless he became the target of anti-Protestant hostility. He apparently asked what kind of treatment Graham expected from Catholics, an indication he recognized that his coreligionists could be highly resistant to Protestant incursions on what they regarded as their rightful turf, particularly when the intruders were Americans. These apprehensions were not unfounded. In Colombia the mayor of Barranquilla, apparently acting under pressure from Catholic clergy, denied Graham permission to speak at that city’s largest baseball stadium, forcing a move to the grounds of an American Presbyterian school. In Maracaibo, protesters tore down crusade placards, replacing them with leaflets warning citizens not to attend the meetings. And while Graham spoke at a government building, they pounded on the doors, fired guns into the air, and brandished signs that read, Yankee No, Down with Kennedy, and Castro Si, forcing the evangelist and his team to beat a hasty retreat through a back door. (Team photographer Russ Busby recalled with amusement his own unwillingness to follow Graham’s suggestion that he “stick around and try to get some pictures. This could be real interesting.”) This incident, which occurred on the fourth anniversary of a Communist defeat in Venezuela, seems to have been more political than religious in nature, fixing on Graham because he was a prominent American rather than because he was a Protestant, and he subsequently preached unmolested to a crowd of 4,000 at a baseball park. The reception in Cali, Colombia, was friendlier, and in the Venezuelan capital of Caracas, a city with only 5,000 Protestants, 32,000 people crowded into a bullfight arena to hear him.
Response to Graham’s visit to Paraguay was both intense and unambiguously Catholic in origin. The archbishop, whom one Graham aide described as “a well-known flagrant homosexual who had corrupted the lives of hundreds of young men,” led the opposition, directing local priests to warn their parishioners not to attend Graham’s meetings. In addition, church leaders organized a protest parade through the streets of Asuncion on the afternoon before the opening service of the crusade in the city. With the unmistakable implication that more than coincidence had been at work, a team member who witnessed the parade recalled a great storm that suddenly blew up while the parade was in progress. “The wind blew trees down, and flipped DC-3s over at the airport,” he remembered. “It blew the Virgin they were carrying around off her pedestal and broke her arm. The rain was incredible. It was a complete disaster. Then, about an hour before the crusade, the weather changed. The stars came out and we had a lovely, cool evening. It was just a fantastic thing.” Even so, crowds were modest, though not embarrassingly small, in both Asuncion and Montevideo, Uruguay.
Graham preached to large crowds in Chile, Argentina, and Brazil, and encountered little organized opposition. Overall, the trip was less than a smashing success. BGEA crusade statistics, which typically list every city in which Graham has held a major public meeting, write off nine weeks of preaching in South America under two brief entries, both consisting of “Tour—South America.” Similarly, authorized histories of Graham’s ministry devote only two or three sentences to the campaign without naming a single country visited. Still, the tour gave Protestant Christianity valuable exposure in newspapers and on television, and veteran Latin American missionary Kenneth Strachan called it a watershed event in South American Evangelicalism, claiming it provided an important impetus for a broad movement of aggressive evangelistic efforts that led to a well-documented surge of Protestantism in many sectors of South America.
As Graham faced his other major challenge of 1962, he must have wondered if the cooperative spirit he had worked so hard to forge was being eroded. Despite his many contacts in the area, he had not held a crusade, or even an outstanding rally, in Chicago since his YFC days in the 1940s. An effort to wangle an invitation in 1958 had come to naught after Mayor Richard Daley, allegedly under pressure from Catholic leaders, openly opposed a Graham crusade, and the Protestant Church Federation of Greater Chicago expressed strong reservations about the high-powered bureaucratic approach Graham’s team imposed on churches in a crusade city. Despite this rebuff, Graham’s Evangelical supporters in the Chicago area continued to aim for a full-scale crusade, often working through enthusiastic laymen who brought pressure on their more reticent pastors. Two years later, at a breakfast meeting with nearly seven hundred Chicago-area ministers, many of whom had been negative about a crusade, the evangelist patiently addressed their concerns and doubts. When he finished, the chair of the meeting, an old friend of Graham’s who had supported him since the YFC days, asked the men to indicate by standing if they wished to invite Billy to hold a crusade in Chicago. All seven hundred stood. After the meeting, Graham acknowledged that the procedure had “looked to some as if it were a bit high-pressure,” but the chairman insisted there was no way such a procedure could be viewed as an attempt to pressure the clergymen, pointing out, apparently as proof, that Graham himself had proposed the rising vote.
While the ostensibly unanimous vote of the clergymen did not quell all doubts, it clearly shifted the balance of power to those favoring a crusade, and in the summer of 1962, Graham preached for three weeks to a packed house at the new McCormick Place arena. Then, at the closing service in Soldier Field, he addressed 116,000 souls, his largest American audience yet. That service was notable in other respects as well. Chicago was suffering from a sweltering heat wave that caused a plague of vapor lock to descend on the long lines of approaching cars, creating a cacophonous tangle outside the stadium. Inside, the sun’s rays seemed to concentrate on the unshaded platform, and the television lights made the pulpit area even hotter, so that Graham risked a heatstroke just by preaching a sermon of normal length. At one point, sweat-soaked and sagging, his head throbbing with pain, he apparently came close to blacking out; though he never stopped talking, one observer later recalled that he suspected an uncut film would reveal several moments of incoherence. Waving his aides away, however, Graham cut the sermon short and managed to offer the invitation. The response was substantial, and the service drew to a close with no further problems, but Graham went immediately to his hotel to sleep off his affliction and weariness.
The evening, however, was not over. After years of practice, Graham had learned to time his sermon so that his television crew could wind up with a film that required only minimal editing to produce an hour-long program. Because of his problems with the heat, however, the service had ended seven minutes early. Since the crew would depart the next day, something had to be done immediately. Aware that Graham was exhausted and asleep, some felt it would be best to have him tape a short concluding message the next morning, but Cliff Barrows had a more dramatic idea. He rousted Graham out of bed and trundled him back to Soldier Field. When viewers saw the program weeks later, the usual closing shots of inquirers streaming toward the platform were suddenly replaced by a slow, sweeping panoramic shot of a littered and empty stadium, deserted except for Billy Graham, who sat alone on the platform, obviously weary, his eyes circled in darkness. “I have come back here to Soldier Field to talk to you,” he said. “I talked on Agrippa almost being persuaded to follow Christ. Some of you during this meeting have almost been persuaded to give your life to Jesus Christ, but you haven’t done it. . . . And as this stadium is empty now, your heart is empty.” For most of seven minutes, he told them that no matter what they had done, no matter where they were, no matter how many times they had previously rejected Christ, it was not too late. And then he said, in what had become one of Evangelical Christianity’s most famous phrases, “I’m going to ask you right now. . . .” Within a few days, the mail and telephone response generated by that dramatic scene outstripped that for any previous appeal in Graham’s ministry.
Two aspects of the Chicago crusade drew little public attention but proved to be of considerable long-term significance for the Graham organization. After the 1957 New York crusade, during which he organized the recruitment of show-business people, Lane Adams found that the hands-on experience gained while working with prospective and new converts translated easily into a more effective ministry in a local pastorate. He felt every pastor ought also to be an evangelist but realized that most seminaries did not provide the skills he had learned while working with the Graham team. At Adams’s instigation, seven students from Columbia Presbyterian Theological Seminary, which he had attended, received internships (paid for by an affluent student at the seminary) to work with the team during a month-long crusade in Philadelphia in the fall of 1961. About the same time, a wealthy California layman, Lowell Berry, was thinking along similar lines. Berry, whose theological leanings had been somewhat liberal before his participation in Graham’s highly successful 1958 San Francisco crusade, had been convinced of both the plausibility of a more Evangelical theology and the effectiveness of high-powered evangelism of the sort Graham practiced. George Wilson recalled that Berry approached BGEA representatives several times, indicating his interest in underwriting a program to enable seminary students and young ministers to obtain intensive instruction in evangelistic theory and methods during Graham crusades. Wilson was not particularly open to the idea, responding that such a program would require a great deal of money. Berry’s simple response—“Well, I have a great deal of money”—-cast a different light on the matter, and at the Chicago crusade, twenty-seven seminarians from seven schools received seminar training and practical field experience in evangelism. The Chicago experience proved so successful that Berry continued his support. Robert Ferm developed a more structured program for an El Paso crusade later in the year, and the Billy Graham School of Evangelism was under way. A year later, a hundred men, including young clergy as well as seminarians, attended a School of Evangelism attached to a Graham crusade in Los Angeles, spending their days in classes taught by members of the team and invited guests, and their evenings watching the master evangelist at work. In subsequent years, the program catered less to seminarians than to pastors, but each major crusade eventually came to include evangelistic training for several hundred ministers. Long after Berry’s death, most of the expense, including travel and lodging for less affluent ministers, was picked up by the Berry Foundation.
A second little-noticed development of the Chicago crusade involved a shift in T. W. Wilson’s role. After Graham persuaded him to come to work for BGEA in 1956, Wilson served as an associate evangelist, using team-developed techniques and personnel to hold crusades on his own, quite independent of Graham’s schedule, or conducting “satellite crusades” in locations not far from cities where Graham was coming or had just been. In the latter case, Graham often preached at the last service or two to give those unable to attend the larger crusade a chance to hear him in person. For Graham’s major crusades, the associate evangelists typically join the larger team, filling in for Billy at various speaking engagements and simply enjoying the chance to visit with other members of the association. During the Chicago crusade, Graham needed a nap one afternoon and asked T.W. to handle a handful of small tasks—returning a few telephone calls, conveying a message to an aide, answering a question for the public relations staff, and the like. A well-organized man, Wilson finished the entire list before Graham awoke. When Billy expressed amazement, T.W. said, “You wanted them done, didn’t you? Well, I did them.”
About two o’clock the next morning, Graham went to Wilson’s room and woke him. “I want you to come with me and help me,” he said. The sleepy Wilson groaned. “Billy,” he said, “we’ve been over this before and the answer is the same. I appreciate you more than I can tell you, but I know what I am supposed to do, and that is preach.”
Graham quickly trotted out the reasoning he had used so effectively so many times before: “I want to ask you a question. Are you more concerned about the number of times you can speak or the most good you can do for Almighty God?”
“Man, that’s beside the point,” Wilson objected.
“Is it? Think about it. First of all, I need somebody who knows me, knows my family, knows my friends, and who is an evangelist himself.”
“Billy, I just can’t do this. I know what I’m supposed to do.”
“Will you pray about it?”
“I don’t need to pray about it.”
“Oh? There’s something in your life you don’t need to pray about?”
“You know what I mean.”
“No, I don’t know what you mean.”
“Anyway,” Wilson recalled with a chuckle, “he was a super salesman. I tried to go back to sleep and couldn’t. I tossed and turned all night. I called my wife back in Dothan, Alabama, but she didn’t help me at all with a decision. She said, ‘Just promise me one thing. Make sure you are in God’s will, because if you are not, you will be miserable, and if you are miserable, we will all be miserable. Just make sure you are in God’s will.’ Well, I didn’t sleep any that night, and I couldn’t sleep the next night either. Finally, I said, ‘Lord, I’ve got to get some sleep. Please help me.’ Then it just seemed like he was impressing on me that this was what I ought to do. And I’ve been doing it ever since.”
After that afternoon in 1962, T. W. Wilson spent most days of the rest of his life at the side or within easy reach of Billy Graham, serving as his gatekeeper, travel agent, valet, nurse, adviser, buffer, booster, defender, listener, jollier, minesweeper, and constant chaperon. Some team members occasionally referred to mild feelings of resentment toward T.W. because of his unique relationship with their leader—inevitably, they perceived such feelings in others rather than in themselves—but colleagues and knowledgeable observers of the Graham organization alike almost invariably described him as “an amazing man,” “one of the strong backbones of the entire association,” “a man who is able to subordinate himself without ever worrying about it a minute,” and “a man who knows how to take care of Billy without making everyone mad.”
T.W.’s chaperonage efforts did not always work out perfectly. Not long after he assumed his new post, Graham fell ill with pneumonia on his way to a meeting in the Philippines and had to be hospitalized in Honolulu. Checking himself out of the hospital against his doctors’ advice, he and Wilson headed back to Montreat. The doctors had been right. By the time the two men reached Los Angeles, Graham’s fever had soared, and he was miserable with a severe bronchial infection, but he insisted on returning home, where Nelson Bell could look after him. When their plane landed in Atlanta, tornadoes and pouring rain made it impossible for airplanes to leave for Asheville, so Graham insisted that T.W. rent a car and head out for home. When they got to Jefferson, Georgia, well after dark, Wilson stopped at a service station to ask for directions. Graham, who had gone to sleep in the back seat, groggily appraised the situation and staggered through the heavy rain to the restroom at the side of the building. When Wilson returned to the car, he never thought to check the back seat but simply jumped in and drove off—leaving Graham in the restroom. The interstate highway had not yet been built, and winding through the hills in a driving rain fully occupied his attention until he finally stopped for gas about midnight in Oteen, North Carolina, less than twenty miles from Montreat. When he turned around to wake Billy up and tell him they were almost home, he was astonished to find an empty back seat. He called Ruth to see if she had heard from her husband. “No,” she said, “I thought he was with you.” Wilson had recalled that, as he pushed along those last few miles wondering what on earth had happened, he could not help considering the possibility that the rapture had occurred and that he and Ruth had not been invited to make the trip.
Graham, of course, knew exactly what had happened, but that did not provide a simple solution. He had heard Wilson preparing to drive off but had not been in a position to pursue him. Sick, rumpled, and unshaven, he went into a cafe attached to the station and tried to call home. Unfortunately, he had just gotten a new unlisted number and could not remember it. With his famous voice rendered unrecognizable by laryngitis, neither could he convince the operator that he was in fact the registered owner of that number. Eventually, he persuaded the driver of the town’s lone taxicab to take him to nearby Greenville, South Carolina, where he knew he could get a ride on to Montreat. The old man insisted Graham put down twenty dollars in advance and refused to believe his claim to be Billy Graham (“I think you are on the lam,” he said) until they reached Greenville’s Holiday Inn, where the manager recognized the evangelist and helped him arrange to rent a car to drive the rest of the way to Montreat.
Back at home, Ruth continued to care for her maturing brood of children and their ever-changing menagerie of dogs, goats, rabbits, ponies, and assorted wildlife. Anne continued to be a kind and tenderhearted girl who gave little trouble to anyone, and youngest daughter Bunny displayed much the same pleasant and pliable spirit. Franklin was cut from different cloth. An independent spirit from the start, he had started experimenting with cigarettes at age three, picking up butts from carpenters working on his mother’s dream home. A few years later, Ruth decided to end the allure of smoking by offering him a pack and inviting him to smoke right in front of her. To her uncomfortable surprise, he quickly drew it down to a stub, then immediately lit up another. Other efforts to break his spirit were no more successful. Once, on the way to a drive-in restaurant in Asheville, his pestering the other children became so aggravating that Ruth stopped the car, pulled him out, and after checking to make sure he could get enough air, locked him in the trunk. When she let him out at the restaurant, he popped out and chirruped to the carhop, “I’ll have a cheeseburger without the meat.”
Ned, six years younger, was an easy target for Franklin’s aggression. Ruth told of an overheard conversation in which Franklin, polishing his shoes by the fireplace, asked his younger brother, “Ned, do you love me?”
Ned, always described as having a gentle spirit, answered, “Yes, my love you.”
Then Franklin sprang the trap: “Well, I don’t love you.”
Reflecting his father’s ability to handle rebuff, Ned leaned back against the hearth and said after a few moments’ thought, “Well, my love you.”
Franklin shot back, “Well, I don’t love you.”
Ned knew where to go for help: “The Bible says . . .”
Franklin cut him off. “The Bible doesn’t say I have to love you, does it?”
“Well . . . ,” Ned ventured, “the Bible says some nice things.”
The soft answer apparently had its effect. Not long afterward, while Ruth was tucking Franklin into bed, she noticed Ned standing at the doorway of Franklin’s bedroom—Franklin had trained him not to enter without permission. The tiny figure shyly asked his brother, “Can I come in and kiss you good night?” This time, Franklin accepted Ned’s affection, and mission accomplished, little brother padded happily off to bed. “You know,” Franklin admitted to his mother, “he’s a pretty good little boy.”
Seventeen-year-old GiGi had lost none of her spunk, but boarding school had removed her from Montreat for most of the year, and a new development was about to remove her forever. During the summer of 1960, while Graham was touring in Europe, his family stayed in Montreux, Switzerland, as the guest of Ara Tchividjian, a wealthy Swiss Armenian who became a Christian after reading Peace with God, flew to New York in 1957 to hear Graham preach, and had been an enthusiastic backer ever since. Over the course of the summer, GiGi, then fourteen, met Tchividjian’s eldest son, Stephan, who was twenty-one. “I thought he was an old man,” she recalled, but Stephan’s grandmother told him, “That is the girl you are going to marry.” Stephan, who was already engaged to a woman his age, thought it absurd, but his grandmother confidently informed him, “God has told me.” The Grahams also admired Stephan. Late one afternoon, looking across a bejeweled mountain lake from the terrace of their home, Billy mused, “Wouldn’t it be wonderful if GiGi and Stephan grew up and fell in love?” Ruth conceded his point, but noting the years and geography that separated them, added, “It’s not going to happen. Let’s pray that she finds someone like Stephan.”
A year passed, and Stephan’s fiancée decided she did not want to marry him. A devout Christian who fully accepted Billy Graham’s exhortation to make everything of consequence a matter for prayer, Stephan began to ask God for help in finding a wife. As he told it, the image that kept coming to his mind and heart was that of GiGi Graham. Because he thought it might be unseemly to approach a girl so young, Tchividjian hesitated making direct contact. “He would start to write,” GiGi recounted, “but he’d always tear up the letters. I never received anything from him—card, flowers, nothing.” Unaware of what was going on in Stephan’s mind, GiGi was dating T. W. Wilson’s son, Jim. Shortly after her seventeenth birthday, she and Jim went off to Wheaton, both assuming they would eventually marry. Early in the fall, Billy and Ruth received a letter from Stephan Tchividjian asking permission to seek their daughter’s hand in marriage. If they consented, he asked them to forward his enclosed letter of proposal to GiGi. If they disapproved, they were to destroy the letter and never tell their daughter he had written.
Ruth and Billy, who had been praying for someone like Stephan, could not help feeling God had given them an even better answer than they had hoped for. They agreed to let GiGi know of the proposal, but not immediately, lest the certain emotional turmoil disrupt her schoolwork. Better to wait until the Christmas holidays. Still, hints must have been dropped, because GiGi said she somehow knew something was going on and, feeling she was going to have to face some momentous decision, began to pray for guidance. As soon as she got back to Little Piney Cove, she asked, “Mother, what’s going on?” Ruth conceded that they had something to discuss but thought it better to wait until the next morning, after a good night’s rest.
GiGi pressed: “Mother, someone wants to marry me, doesn’t he?”
Ruth was taken aback. “How did you know?”
GiGi admitted she had nothing concrete to go on but spilled out her hunches. “I don’t know, but he’s not American, is he?” Then, “Stephan Tchividjian has asked for my hand in marriage, hasn’t he?”
“When Mother said yes,” GiGi recalled, “I knew it was serious. I told her, ‘I need to do some real praying, and I need to see him.’ But Mother said, ‘No. You are in love with Jim. If Stephan arrived, you are not emotionally involved with him, and you will make the wrong decision.’”
Ruth’s response, if correctly remembered, seemed to reveal that she felt confident about what the right decision would be and was concerned only with strategy. Billy apparently felt no qualms on either score. When GiGi got him alone in the kitchen and told him she needed to see Stephan, he said, “No problem,” and dialed the Tchividjian home, forgetting it was the middle of the night in Switzerland. After a few moments on the telephone, he informed Ruth that Stephan would be joining them for Christmas.
“I spent the next few days either on my knees or sitting in my window seat,” GiGi recounted, “seeking God’s direction. I wanted to give Stephan an answer when he got there and not go through the regular courtship routine. I prayed that the Lord would tell me what answer to give, but no answer came. The night before he was to come in, I asked Daddy if I could drive to the airport to pick him up. I hadn’t driven much, and Daddy didn’t think it would be safe, since there was snow on the ground. I asked, ‘If the snow has melted and it’s a pretty day, will you let me do it?’ And he said, ‘Okay.’ Well, it was a clear, beautiful day. All the way to the airport, I prayed and prayed, but of course I got no answer. Then when the plane landed and he stepped out, the answer came: ‘Yes.’ That’s all. I didn’t feel any love or any other emotion. Just ‘yes.’ When we got in the car, I told him, ‘Stephan, the Lord has told me to say yes.’ He expected that I would want to finish my education, but we talked about it with Mother and Daddy, and because of Daddy’s schedule, they thought it would be better if we got married in Europe in May. That took Stephan by surprise.”
Meanwhile, Jim Wilson had been in the dark. GiGi remembered going down the mountain to the Wilsons’ modest home and breaking the news to the unsuspecting young man. “It was the hardest thing I ever did. I wanted to throw my arms around him and tell him how sorry I was, but I asked the Lord to control my emotions. I was acting in obedience. Jim also wanted God’s will for our lives, and he handled it with absolute grace and maturity. He and Stephan had a long talk, and he was so impressed by Stephan.” For all his maturity, however, GiGi admitted that “it took Jim awhile to trust a girl again.”
Would GiGi recommend a similar course of action for her own seven children? “I think it’s crazy,” she said with a laugh. “It had to be an exception. Stephan was older. I can’t see a seventeen-year-old getting married to another seventeen-year-old. My children think the whole story is crazy, and they have no desire to follow in my footsteps.”
Graham spent the first half of 1963 in a series of crusades and rallies in France and West Germany, with the now-standard set of European reactions: denunciation from leftist politicians, condescending opposition from clerics of the state churches and liberal theologians, secular skepticism from journalists and intellectuals, and sufficient enthusiasm from Evangelicals and the general populace to guarantee larger-than-expected crowds and expressions of grudging admiration from former critics. The major event of the second half of the year was a return engagement in Los Angeles, the scene of his first great crusade. This time, instead of a tent set up on a vacant lot, Graham held forth in the Coliseum, the nation’s largest stadium. For most of the three-and-a-half weeks, crowds of between 30,000 and 60,000 people, most representing or invited by members of the 3,500 participating churches, heard Graham preach. Then, at the last service, 134,254 souls jammed into the sprawling stadium, while an estimated 20,000 others milled around disappointedly outside. It not only eclipsed the 1962 Soldier Field assembly as Graham’s largest American crowd but set a record for the Coliseum that according to television commentators at the 1984 Olympics, still stands, commemorated by a bronze plaque bearing a bas-relief sculpture of the evangelist’s head.
In Fundamentalist eyes, the Los Angeles campaign set another, less glorious record, when Graham acquiesced in the choice of Methodist bishop Gerald Kennedy as the chairman of the crusade’s general committee. Though the position was largely honorary—most of the real oversight of the crusade was done by Graham’s team and the local executive committee, which was usually dominated by Evangelicals—Kennedy was, in truth, a surprising choice. His theology was frankly liberal—he had once ventured that he doubted the deity of Christ and admitted he had never believed in the Virgin Birth. Fundamentalist critics also charged him with leftist political views “of the rankest sort,” noting that he belonged to such “Communist front” organizations as the National Council of Churches and the Methodist Federation for Social Action. Allowing such a man to have a prominent public role in an evangelistic crusade, critics charged, marked “the farthest reach yet into the apostasy for Crusade leadership.” Graham chose not to trouble himself with Fundamentalist carpings, but Robert Ferm, his chief apologist, pointed out that Kennedy had been appointed by local churchmen, that the actual conduct of the crusade would be controlled “by Mr. Graham and our Team only,” and that he found it difficult to believe Kennedy would have accepted the post “if he did not believe in the basic Christian truths.” Further, in the spirit of pragmatism that had long typified professional revivalism, Ferm observed that “it is so easy to find someone who believes all the fundamentals but who won’t work.” Kennedy was working, the crusade was succeeding, souls were being saved, and that, dear brothers, was that.
But pragmatism was not the only factor at work. Graham’s fundamental beliefs and theological method had changed little, but as he put it in an article for Christian Century, “[A]fter a decade of intimate contact with Christians the world over I am now aware that the family of God contains people of various ethnological, cultural, class, and denominational differences. I have learned that there can even be minor disagreements of theology, methods, and motives, but that within the true church there is a mysterious unity that overrides all divisive factors. In groups which in my ignorant piousness I formerly ‘frowned upon’ I have found men so dedicated to Christ and so in love with the truth that I have felt unworthy to be in their presence. I have learned that although Christians do not always agree, they can disagree agreeably, and that what is most needed in the church today is for us to show an unbelieving world that we love one another.”
Graham’s ever-widening acceptance of others who professed to be Christians manifested itself not only in his continued association with the World Council of Churches—he attended its general assembly in New Delhi in 1961 at the council’s invitation—but also in an improved relationship with Catholics, especially after John XXIII assumed the papal chair. Following John Kennedy’s election, he scrupulously avoided any statements that could be construed as anti-Catholic, a relaxation of wariness that bothered some of Graham’s colleagues. Robert Ferm, a man of catholic spirit but emphatically Protestant theology, exemplified the ambivalence some team members felt about consorting with Catholics. Whenever Graham’s supporters or critics inquired about the evangelist’s apparently weakening resistance to papist wiles, Ferm was quick to draw a firm baseline. “Certainly Catholic priests do not attend [crusade services],” he told a Kansas minister who had heard rumors of apostate fraternizing at the Chicago crusade. “[They] have not been invited to participate in any way. Nor would they do so if they were invited. They know altogether too well the gospel that Mr. Graham preaches.” That knowledge, Ferm felt certain, explained why priests sometimes discouraged parishioners from attending Graham’s meetings. “As you know,” he wrote, “Roman Catholicism flourishes on ignorance. As long as people are not informed, Catholicism can prosper. It is only when people are informed that the hierarchy of the Roman Church gets into trouble. That is why it is so important for each one of us to be constantly active in informing people of the teaching and the political aspirations of the Roman Communion.” Ferm admitted that Graham seemed to admire Pope John and what he was trying to accomplish in the Roman Church but felt it should be remembered that this particular pope was “a rare exception . . . and one of the few concerning whom a particularly complimentary statement might be made.”
Observers who applauded Graham’s softening attitude toward liberal Protestants and Catholics found his stand on racial issues less satisfying. To be sure, he maintained his commitment to “non-segregated” crusades—he shied away from the term integration lest he be associated with civil rights radicalism—and even in the South, he insisted that black leaders be seated on the platform and have a visible role on the program. Though he expressly told Martin Luther King he did not intend to join him in the streets (and has claimed King felt that to be a wise and prudent course of action), he called for the prosecution of whites who attacked blacks who were peacefully demonstrating to obtain the rights that should unquestionably be theirs. Still, he stopped short of articulating any practical course of action that churches or communities might take to ease racial discrimination, and he cautioned that although confrontational marches and freedom rides were effective, they might create resistance that could never be broken down. “Jim Crow must go,” he told a press conference just prior to his 1962 Chicago crusade, “but I am convinced that some extreme Negro leaders are going too far and too fast.” Even while Dr. King languished in the Birmingham jail in the spring of 1963, Graham told a New York Times interviewer that his “good personal friend” would be well-advised to “put on the brakes a little bit,” that his timing was “questionable,” and that blacks and whites alike would benefit from “a period of quietness in which moderation prevails.”
In the summer of 1963, Graham not only refused to take part in the March on Washington, the most memorable civil rights demonstration in American history, but challenged King’s most arresting image: “I have a dream that my four little children one day will live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.” Graham had no quibble with the dream, but his theology and philosophy of change left no room for such a vision of harmony. “Only when Christ comes again,” he said, “will the little white children of Alabama walk hand in hand with little black children.” In the meantime even proximate harmony could be achieved only by “Christians working in love from both sides.” Graham’s apparent discounting of human efforts to achieve social justice and his criticism of clergymen who make “the race issue their gospel” dismayed black churchmen. A Presbyterian pastor who actively supported the Coliseum crusade in Los Angeles nevertheless lamented that Graham chose neither to condemn racism nor to advocate equal rights during the campaign, despite the national preoccupation with these issues. The president of the National Association of Negro Evangelicals lamented that “Dr. Graham consistently fails to appreciate the intensity of this great social dilemma which cries out to be met head-on.” As for Graham’s contention that forced integration would not work, the black clergyman said simply and accurately, “It has worked time and time again.”
When a racist cabal set a bomb that exploded in a Sunday-school room of Birmingham’s Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, killing four little black girls, Graham not only shared in the revulsion felt throughout the nation but joined Drew Pearson in spearheading a fund drive to rebuild the damaged church. On the strength of this effort, and because of his long-standing policy on integrated crusades, BGEA associate evangelist Howard Jones and another pro-Graham minister, Ralph Bell, were able to persuade the National Association of Negro Evangelicals to pass a resolution commending Graham for his efforts on behalf of racial justice and harmony, but the sentiment was far from unanimous, and it is doubtful the resolution would have passed without active lobbying by Jones and Bell. Two years later, Bell would join BGEA as a full-time associate evangelist.
Apart from his unavoidable entanglement in the race issue, Graham was far less involved in social and political matters during the Kennedy administration than in the previous decade. He decried the Supreme Court’s decisions to ban devotional Bible reading and prayer from public schools but commended Kennedy for opposing federal aid to parochial schools. He continued to describe Communist advances as an apocalyptic threat that was “almost surely a sign of the Second Coming” and regarded “a virile, dynamic, orthodox Christianity” as the only philosophical weapon with “any possibility of combatting the Communist conspiracy,” but he repudiated John Birch Society founder Robert Welch’s charge that America’s pulpits were filled with legions of covert Communists, noting that he had never met a single minister in the United States whom he suspected of being a Communist. As a further sign of his retreat from the hard-line anticommunism he espoused in the 1950s, he recommended that the United States send massive quantities of surplus food to Communist China during a 1961 food shortage. “We are not at war with the people of China,” he said. “I feel we have a moral and spiritual responsibility to share our surpluses with them. We cannot compromise with their ideology, but we should feed them when they are hungry.”
In part, Graham’s diminishing dogmatism reflected a growing awareness, nurtured by travel and association with a wide range of religious and political leaders on six continents, that the Manichaean dichotomies of Fundamentalism were a bit too neat, that people and positions and motives were often more complicated than he had once believed. But at least part of his lower political profile stemmed from the fact that his man, Richard Nixon, had lost the election, and the winner, John Kennedy, still regarded him with some reserve. The two men exchanged Christmas greetings and sat next to each other at the Presidential Prayer Breakfast, and Graham recalled that Kennedy told him he was the only Protestant minister he felt comfortable with, but he admitted he was never in the First Family’s private quarters, and visited the Oval Office no more than three or four times. It was said that the President could mimic the evangelist’s distinctive manner of speaking, that he “gritted his teeth sometimes” when they were together, and that Jackie Kennedy saw no reason whatever to cultivate closer ties with the Graham family. The coolness was mutual. In January 1963, Graham implied that four years of Kennedy leadership would be quite enough by gratuitously remarking that “John Connally has the necessary abilities to be President of the United States, but I’m not making an endorsement. I’m just giving advice to the Democratic Party.”
Despite their limited contact, Graham respected Kennedy and doubtless hoped for a closer relationship in the future. In that spirit he had grave misgivings about Kennedy’s trip to Texas in 1963. Not long before the trip, he tried to contact the President through Senator Smathers. When he told Smathers of his fear, based on conversations with his many friends in Texas, that the situation in Dallas would be tense, perhaps even dangerous, Smathers assured him that “the President probably already knows that,” but indicated he would convey the message to Kennedy. Graham never heard from the White House and decided he was being unnecessarily apprehensive. “I had such a strong feeling about it,” he recalled, “but then it occurred to me what a ridiculous thing it was, and I didn’t pursue the matter any further.” A few days later, while playing golf with T. W. Wilson at a club near Montreat, Graham received word that the President and Governor Connally had been shot. They sped to a nearby BGEA-owned radio station, where Graham went on the air while Wilson called Parkland Hospital in Dallas. By a fluke of timing, they learned Kennedy was dead before the national media released the news. Graham recalls that he withheld confirmation of the death until the major networks announced it; Wilson remembers holding a scribbled note to the glass on the booth where Graham was speaking and believes the evangelist may in fact have been the first to tell a public audience, however small, that the nation had lost its leader. In the days that followed, Graham was, of course, repeatedly asked for comments on the tragedy. The death of the young President, whom he described as “intensely interested in spiritual things,” was, he conceded, “a terrible thing,” but he hoped some good might yet come of it. Noting the marked increase in the number of people who attended church on the Sunday following the assassination, he observed that “we must have a terrible shock sometimes to rouse us out of our spiritual neglect and apathy.”
The decade following John Kennedy’s death hardly delivered the revival Billy Graham dared hope for in the aftermath of the assassination, but it did produce a notable resuscitation of his own involvement in affairs of state. His well-known friendship with Richard Nixon, coupled with his awkward involvement in the 1960 campaign, made it seem likely that his return to favor at the White House would probably have to await the return to power of the GOP. Insofar as Graham imagined that to be the case, he underestimated Lyndon Johnson.